Chapter XXIII

FULFILMENTS AND DREAMS ON THE SABINE HILLS.

Thus Ethne went back to be the light and joy of the home among the mountains, which had grown so familiar to her; but she came with a new light and a new joy. The gaiety and buoyancy of her race, and the free, imaginative delight in nature were still there, but there was added the tender grace of matronhood; the old world and the new, the sunset and the dawn, had blended; the weight of the cares of that old world of Marius were on her, as the power of her new hope was on him.

“It is _conjugium_,” they said, “no mere (_contubernium_) dwelling together, but _working under a yoke_ together; His yoke which is fruitful, His burden which makes us run the swifter, as ‘the burden of wings to a bird, or sails to a ship.’”

For always the burden of this universal slavery, which was crushing the Roman world, weighed on Ethne; denying as it did the sanctity of married life to the toiling many, and making unholy life so terribly easy to the luxurious few; degrading all, in fact, to one level of evil, because virtually rejecting the sacred equality of a common humanity. The Christian Church had indeed begun her long battle with this evil as with all others; but to Ethne, coming from a social life of another kind, entangled no doubt with its own difficulties and wrongs, but not debased with these, it seemed as if the way made hitherto through all these centuries of Christianity was very little.

“It was written so long ago,” she said, “that tender letter of Paul the Apostle interceding for a runaway slave. Not even a good slave, but ‘unprofitable.’ Yet the great Apostle calls him ‘My own son in the faith,’ and says to his master—‘Receive him not as a slave, but a brother beloved.’ To the master, think, four hundred years ago! And what master acknowledges this now?”

“Scarcely even our own Leo,” Marius said. “Does not this perplex thee in Leo?”

“Why should it?” she said. “Does not Leo himself say to God continually, ‘We can do nothing good without Thee’? I suppose if he finds by and by that he has made a mistake, he will say in his humility, as he would say now if he saw it, ‘I must have done that without Thee.’ Besides, beloved, it is not so easy, I know, for him or for you, or for any of us, even to ‘_think_ the thing that is rightful,’ much less to do it.”

“What indeed can we do?” he said. “To emancipate the slaves would be to doom them to starvation, unprotected, disorganized, helpless, degraded.”

“We must _be_ Christian,” she said, with her victorious smile, “and let the rest follow! We must love them, worship with them, believe in the image of God in them, however defaced; in the brotherhood of Christ with them, however unrecognized. He is sure to conquer in the end. And He is sure to give us our bit of His battle to fight.”

One day of their wanderings together among the mountains remained stamped for ever on Ethne’s heart. The dusk was falling on the valleys, but on a crest of the mountains above them, a temple of the ancient gods (Marius believed of Apollo) shone golden in the evening light. A little company of mountain folk were moving slowly towards the portals, bearing a lamb garlanded for sacrifice. After a time they reappeared, and a strain of wild, weird music wound in and out, echoing among the hills. Heathen rites were indeed still practised there, and forbidden worship was still offered, which would not have been ventured on in less remote places. At the same time, below, on the other side, on the top of a low hill near them, Ethne saw a rude uncouth wooden cross, like a gibbet, standing alone, stretching out its arms; a ghastly horror confronting the beautiful marble temple on the height.

At the foot of that uncouth cross knelt a man, clothed in rough dark garments, with a sheepskin capote, such as was worn by the shepherds of the region. But as they drew nearer Ethne saw that his head was tonsured. His arms were clasped around the cross. Ethne and Marius stopped beside him and reverently bowed their heads. They felt in a sacred place.

“_Patibulum crucis_, the gibbet of the cross!” Marius said in a low voice, quoting a well-known Ambrosian hymn. “The legend in the country is, that this cross is the last left of a multitude on which the vanquished slaves of one of the terrible Servile Wars were crucified ages ago. The cross, you know, was a punishment only awarded to a slave.”

Ethne’s whole face quivered, and tears streamed from her eyes. As they stood there speechless, the kneeling figure arose. Approaching them, and seeing Ethne weeping, the stranger said, looking up at the cross, “Lady, _dost thou understand_?”

She could not speak. She had indeed understood too keenly. Then a radiant joy shone from the stranger’s face, and looking up at the pagan temple glistening on the opposite height, with a slight accent which they recognized as Greek—

“_This_ will conquer _that_,” he said; and looking down on a fetter on one of his wrists, he added, “will conquer _that_ and _this_. I also have been a slave.”

“No longer a slave,” she murmured, taking his hard, wrinkled, aged hand in hers, “a brother beloved!”

“Thou dost indeed understand!” he replied, in a tremulous voice. “But how couldst thou have known? I also was a runaway slave. I was in one of the stateliest and most wicked households in Rome; myself among the worst there,—only a child in years, but old in degradation and sin,—when one memorable day, at the games in the Coliseum, in the arena suddenly appeared that unknown monk from the Egyptian deserts, and tried to stop the combat, and was listened to for a moment, and then crushed to death beneath the shower of stones. But he saved Rome from that iniquity for ever, and he saved me! The vision of that sacrifice of pity haunted me night and day, until I fled from that den of iniquity—fled hither to the Cross, to the Christ, for ever.”

And without another word he left them, and vanished among the rocks.

“Was it an angel of God?” Ethne said, when he was gone.

“An angel of God to us at all events, my beloved,” Marius replied, as they walked slowly homeward.

Those were, moreover, to Ethne, months of much happy learning of many things. Still in many ways a child of the wilderness, it was a constant joy to her to learn through Marius the secrets of his ancient world. And above all, she delighted, with ever-increasing wonder and joy, in drinking with him of what to her, lover of all fountains, was the new and perennial fountain of “the Testaments of God.”

“Freedom, law, life: order, beauty, truth: everything is there,” she would say. “My own people at home cannot indeed taste of all the riches of your learning. But they can have, they will have, through Patrick they _have_ this, the best of all!”

In another of these walks among the deepest recesses of the hills, they came on a little cluster of dwellings which had a different look from those around. Flocks of sheep were feeding high up on the sweet mountain pastures, and a boy and girl were watching them. At the door of the farm buildings stood a young woman, with a fine expressive face and large dark eyes, and, beside her, her husband, an athletic, soldierly-looking man, apparently some years older than his wife. They greeted Ethne and Marius with a frank equal greeting, very different from the shrinking or sullen look common among the slave labourers. There was something in the young wife’s face which greatly attracted Ethne, and seemed familiar to her in a way she could not account for. When they passed the farm she said to Marius—

“Those people seem more like our own upper clansmen at home than any others I have seen here. Who are they?”

“The man was a centurion,” he replied. “After one of the late Eastern wars, he left the army and retired here to his father’s lands. His mother is said to be of Gothic birth, and his wife comes of some Eastern race. I believe his father was of ancient Sabine descent, as ancient as our own. Would to heaven there were more such! I think then Rome need not fear the Goths!”

“Are they Christians?” Ethne asked.

“They are,” he replied. “Christians, it is said, from the days of Nero.”

Thus the months passed swiftly on in a deep calm flow of peace and love; whilst meantime Baithene was devoting himself with single-hearted earnestness to learning everything of art or science, of handicraft or state-craft, of law or literature, that would be of use to his people.

Before long a tragic echo from the world outside did indeed break in on this sunny calm.

The year after the retreat of the Huns from Italy and rescued Rome, came the news how, at one more of his numerous nuptials, with a beautiful young maiden called Ildico (a name which seemed a suspicious echo of some Gothic word enfeebled by Latin lips), on the day after the wedding, after waiting until late in the afternoon, at last the attendants ventured in to see what their master might require, and found him stretched on his face on the bed, quite dead, the blood which had streamed from his face staining the ground below; while the bride sat weeping beside him, closely veiled, and speechless.

No explanation was ever made as to how it happened: if by the hands of the young bride, no vengeance seems to have followed; if as the result of the hard drinking at the wedding feast, this did not lessen the lamentations of his people. For them indeed all their long career of victory and plunder ended with the life of their chief. His Tartar horsemen wheeled with wild lamentations around his bier. He was buried in secret, and the captives and slaves who laid him beneath the earth were killed when their work was done, that none might ever violate his grave. No man knoweth of his tomb to this day; and his empire crumbled into dust with its founder.

The death of Attila did indeed remove a great weight of dread from the wretched Imperial court and from the falling Empire. It remained to be seen whether, after all, it would prove to have been only the lifting off of a weight which had crushed the crumbling State for the moment into some semblance of consolidation.

Soon after the tidings reached Marius and Ethne on their mountain heights, he missed her from his side, and found her kneeling in her chamber weeping bitterly.

“I know the relief it is to Rome and the world,” she said. “I did not want thee to see me in tears; but I could not help weeping for that poor heathen king. If only he had met a few more Christians like Lupus and our Leo, who knows but the heart of the beast might have gone out of him, and he might have become a man again. For he was born a human babe of a human mother.”

Marius said nothing, but drew her out among the hills and streams to soothe and comfort her. Their way that day lay by a road they did not often take, by the ruins of the magnificent villa of Nero, below the artificial lakes, into which he had gathered the waters from the hills. The lakes were still there, crystal clear from the fountains, heavenly blue under that Italian sky, or steeped in depths of varied colour from the reflections of the craggy steeps and wooded slopes around them.

As they stood there Ethne said—

“If only we Christians had remained what the martyrdoms of Nero made us in that awful night at Rome, torches to illuminate the city and the world, how bright the city and the world would have been before this!”

“In truth,” he replied, “it is not martyrdom we have to dread, but the deadly chill in our own hearts. And that,” he added, “every day and for ever thou keepest away from me. And by and by thou shalt take me to thy country, where the Christians are still early Christians, of the stamp of Nero’s Christians; away to thy land of the fountains and the saints.”

“Beloved,” she said, smiling, “you also have your fountains; and Ireland has not all or only saints.”

Sweet human hopes came dawning on the two homes. The year of the death of Attila brought two little sons to the palace on the Aventine and the house among the Sabine hills.

The joy was very great in both homes. If Ethne had been as a fountain of youth to Marius, these babes seemed to bring back youth to Damaris. She travelled backwards and forwards in a flutter of new possession and new hope from Rome to the mountains. North and south, the new world and the old seemed visibly blended in those two precious blossoms of new human life.

“The sunset has indeed met the dawn,” she said, “and naturally the dawn has conquered, and there is a new day.”

On one of Damaris’ first visits to Ethne the mother, Ethne said—

“Mother,” calling her thus for the first time, “I have had a beautiful dream. I saw Nero’s villa, and the heathen temple, and the slave huts dissolve before my eyes. And, instead, a fair church shone on one of the mountains (Monte Cassino, I think Marius called it), the music of sweet psalms echoed among the hills, and happy peasants, instead of taking sheep and lambs garlanded for sacrifice to the pagan temples, brought home their little children from the church, in white robes of baptism. And a holy man clad in white woollen robes met them from the church on the mountain. And I thought he was a man of your old Anician house.[6] And from the church came troops of white-robed men following them; and from the lakes poured forth a great river plashing and dashing through valley and plain on to Rome, and on and on through the world, to our far West and everywhere; and everywhere it brought with it freshness and gladness and life. What can that mean? Must it not mean something very good for this darling and for the world?”

“Thou wilt bring thy little son to God, and God will surely make him a fountain of blessing to the world,” said Damaris, very tenderly. “But we scarcely needed a dream to promise us that!”

Then very earnestly Ethne added to Marius—

“This child may be called Paul, may he not? Because of Paul’s conquering Nero, and because of his letter to the master about his slave.” Which request was solemnly promised to be fulfilled, and the mother forbidden to discourse any further for the time.

Lucia, meantime, having in vain sought loyally for a Celtic name which Latin lips could pronounce, and which would not seem too barbarous for her little son, finally contented herself and every one with the name of Patrick, the Apostle of the Irish.

And so, when the next Baptismal Festival came, at the Epiphany, the two babes were brought to the baptistery of Constantine at the Lateran.

And there, in the water from the fountains on the Sabine hills (as Ethne liked to think), the Aqua Claudia and the Fons Ceruleus, the two little sons of Rome and Ireland were baptized by the great Bishop Leo, and sent forth on their journey of life, to be known thenceforth by the dear and consecrated names of Paul and Patrick.